Black, Colleen

SECRET CITY FILM COLLECTION
ORAL HISTORY OF COLLEEN BLACK
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
October 20, 2004
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me that they’ve heard you speak to friends of hers. Her husband’s Dr. Ricche. Della Ricche is her name…
MRS. BLACK: Oh…
MR. MCDANIEL: Tall, blonde headed, you must have just spoken to their medical…
MRS. BLACK: Medical.
MR. MCDANIEL: Medical wives or...
MRS. BLACK: Yeah…medical wives…yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: And she’s telling me, “You need to interview her.” I said, “Oh, she’s on my advisory board and I’m absolutely going to interview her.” So I interviewed her once but I have to do it again. But I want to interview the mayor again too…
MRS. BLACK: Oh good…ok.
MR. MCDANIEL: Because I told him… I said, “David,” I said, “you lost so much weight.” He’s lost about 20 pounds…
MRS. BLACK: Oh well. I wish I could say the same.
MR. MCDANIEL: His double chins gone. So I said I want to interview you again, because there are more things I want to talk to you about anyway, but anyway, so tell me, let’s just do this again. Tell me about how you first came to Oak Ridge…
MRS. BLACK: Well, I first came to Oak Ridge with my parents in 1944. I didn’t want to come and I didn’t want to stay, but my parents assured me it was just a temporary thing we were going through. That we’d be, you know, going back home right after the war. And, of course, that was over sixty years ago and I’m still here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now how old were you when you came to Oak Ridge?
MRS. BLACK: 18.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok…so what did you do when you got here? Did you work or did you go to school?
MRS. BLACK: No, I was, I had graduated from high school and so I applied for a job and I got it…K-25. Then they put me through some training to teach me how to test for leaks in pipes and I didn’t know why we had to have the pipes or why they needed to be leak proof or where they were going, but I tested them. Then, if there were any leaks in the pipes, we sent them back and they repaired them. And that was my job, but I couldn’t tell anybody then what I was doing. I was a leak test operator.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? How long did you do that?
MRS. BLACK: About two years, ’44 to ’46.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well what was it like? Tell me a little bit about your family, you know, and I know you had a, didn’t you have a brother that was in the service?
MRS. BLACK: I did. I had a brother that was in the service. That was the reason we came, because my mother wanted to go into war work and get the war over with and bring…everybody home and get back to normal. But there were 10 children in the family, so it was very difficult to find a place to live in Oak Ridge with that many children. Besides that, you had to have, you had to have the proper job and you had to have just the right credentials to get a job. Being on construction, which my father was, he didn’t have the credentials to get a cemesto house. They wouldn’t give a home to a working mother because she wasn’t the head of the family. So, but eventually we got a trailer. It was a double-wide and my brother went to work, and he got a hut. He lived in a hutment. I applied for a dorm and got the dormitory room. So we weren’t home all at the same time. But when we were, you know, we ate in shifts, we slept in shifts, we worked in shifts, but it was the thing to do then. You know we’d do anything for the war effort.
MR. MCDANIEL: What was being a young woman like here in, you know, what was, when’d you come? ’44?
MRS. BLACK: In ’44. It was a wonderful place for the singles. I think the housewives had it a lot worse than we because they had to stand in line, maybe holding babies, and juggling ration points and all the things they had to go through. But the single person, we could go to the cafeteria and we could eat and there were dances and a lot of recreation for us. We had about five bowling alleys and a lot of movie theaters and there were a lot of sports. You know, every shift in the plant, I think, had a bowling league and a ball league. They were very active then.
MR. MCDANIEL: What was the social life like?
MRS. BLACK: It was great. Like I say, the dances and when I worked, I worked for a GI and it was nice to be able to date a GI because they had access to the PX. Instead of bringing you flowers and a box of candy, he would bring you a box of soap and maybe a candy bar. That was great because soap was just really scarce and with all that mud we needed a lot of soap.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me about the mud a little bit…
MRS. BLACK: Oh it was horrible.
MR. MCDANIEL: And what was it like to stay clean?
MRS. BLACK: Well it was very difficult to stay clean. I know the first day I got here I lost a shoe. You’d put your foot down and the shoe just disappeared in the mud. And shoes were rationed. So I went over and applied to get some safety shoes. You could order the safety shoes through the plant, and they had the big steel toes, and if you qualified you could get the safety shoes. Since I worked on pipes and they might drop on your feet, I qualified. They weren’t very pretty. They weren’t glamorous. But the mud was bad and you would always have a bathtub full of muddy boots, I mean if you could get the boots. It was hard. We had one fella and he said that he worked in the mud all day and he came home, went in the dormitory and took a shower with his clothes on. He said he just liked to do his laundry and his personal bathing at the same time. So that was one way to do it.
MR. MCDANIEL: What was it like living in the dorm?
MRS. BLACK: It was great. There was, it was young, everybody was young. That’s hard to believe now that everybody’s so old. But the median age was something like 35. You know you couldn’t live here unless you worked here. I mean very few, maybe there was a couple of grandmothers but not very many. They were all very young people just here to have a good time and get the war over. There’s a real spirit about working together and working hard and playing hard. So it was fun.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, you got around, I guess, on buses.
MRS. BLACK: Buses. You know they didn’t make cars after 1942 because they were making planes and jeeps and tanks and all those things. So if you had a car, you were lucky. But see, since gas was rationed, you couldn’t have, you couldn’t go take a Sunday afternoon drive, you’d feel guilty. If anyone did have a car, you usually had to fill it up. You just wouldn’t, one person just go out and take a drive. So we did have buses. We had a lot of buses in Oak Ridge. We had on-area buses, that were nice and modern. And we had off-area buses. We had work buses that were like, they called them cattle cars. They were kind of like cattle cars they had benches on both sides and a stove in the middle. And you would just slide from one end to the other. But you’d get to work. And they had free buses right at the very beginning, you didn’t have to pay to ride the bus.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, let’s see, what else do I want to talk about. Tell me the story about I guess this is a little bit later. Tell me about how you met your husband.
MRS. BLACK: Met my husband at work. I was, they called it “on the floor.” There was a great big floor in the conditioning building where they did nothing but test pipes. So he came in and he needed a few girls to go with him, somewhere secret. I was one of them chosen and that’s how I met him. I met him on Halloween night, it was. So we dated and you know there were plenty of dances and like I say, bowling alleys and there were buses to Big Ridge. You could go up there and have a nice, you know, swim or canoe, whatever. It was fun.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now talk a little bit about the cafeterias. Tell me about the cafeterias. What the food was like.
MRS. BLACK: Well I thought it was good if you didn’t have to cook it and if you didn’t have to stand in line to buy it. The cafeterias were, I thought, were wonderful. Now I’ve heard a lot of people say they were terrible. But I guess I didn’t know any better. We’d go to the cafeteria and right away you could get what you wanted to for under a dollar. Afterwards we’d, sometimes we’d just stay and have a sing-along. That’s where we met other people and it was just kind of a gathering place. I liked the cafeterias.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now what’s the story…you said you had some of the silverware…
MRS. BLACK: Oh! (laugh) Well you weren’t supposed to steal the silverware. But you couldn’t buy any forks and knives, anything because everything had gone to war. But the cafeteria had knives and forks and spoons. So when we got married, we didn’t have anything to eat with at home, so we each took a set from the cafeteria. They had U.S. printed on them and we said that meant “us”. We really had planned to take them back, you know after the war. But somehow the cafeterias closed and they left, and I’m left with one tablespoon. That’s all I have of our collection.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you still have the tablespoon.
MRS. BLACK: I still have the tablespoon with U.S. on it, my souvenir.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you got married? When did you get married?
MRS. BLACK: Got married in ’45. 1945. I got married at the Chapel-on-the-Hill. It was like taking a number in the meat market, so many people getting married because we were very young. In those days we got married and then we moved into a house. I mean you couldn’t get a house unless you were married. The military couldn’t get a house. Well, the higher ups could, but I mean just the plain old GI who worked out the plant, we weren’t really qualified for anything more than, we called it a victory cottage. We didn’t get that right away. We had to get on a list. We were pleased with that. I mean it was just a small little unit, sort of like a duplex. It had an icebox. It didn’t even have a refrigerator. And the stove was hard to do. It was oil. I didn’t know how to use that. But anyway we managed. Glad to get it.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you eventually got a D house…
MRS. BLACK: Well, as we qualified, we moved up. See in order to get an A house, see, you had to have a child. A B house…a C house you had to have two children, had to have three children I guess for the C house. And for the D house and they had to be the opposite sex over a certain age, so it was really complicated. So we moved from, well we moved from the trailer to the victory cottage, to an A, to an E, and then finally to the D. And I’m still in the D.
MR. MCDANIEL: When did you move to the D…when your…
MRS. BLACK: Me? It was in 1950.
MR. MCDANIEL: 1950?
MRS. BLACK: After we qualified. After we had three children. (laugh) So…we have eight children, we had eight children, we still have, so…
MR. MCDANIEL: Well my goodness.
MRS. BLACK: So anyway, the house just kind of, it grew with us. Then we could add to it and, dig down under, put a little attic in, and put in a basement, and decks, so.
MR. MCDANIEL: So what did you…what did your husband do during the war for work…
MRS. BLACK: Well. It was a secret. I don’t know. He was in the Army. And the Army did things that, I don’t know what they did. But they were on call and they could work two shifts or so, you know. At first, they lived in the barracks, the Army barracks. Then that was confusing and they couldn’t get any sleep with the maids coming in making up the beds in the morning. So they moved the GIs that were on the same shift in the same plant area, they each got a separate hut. So he moved in the hutment. And that worked better, that they all worked for the same shift. Then, I don’t know what he did. I mean they didn’t have a telephone in the hut. If he had to stay at work, he just stayed at work. Maybe they’d just send for him. So I don’t know. He worked in the conditioning building, 1401.
MR. MCDANIEL: In K-25?
MRS. BLACK: K-25.
MR. MCDANIEL: So he got out of the service and stayed in Oak Ridge? Or…
MRS. BLACK: He got out of the service and went with the newly formed AEC [Atomic Energy Commission]. And so we just stayed here through DOE [Department of Energy] and whatever else that came along. It was just, I don’t know, just easy. We liked it here, we made friends here, they had good schools, good recreation around the lakes and we liked the area.
MR. MCDANIEL: Talk a little bit about in the war years. I mean the sense of, I guess the sense of, you know, they call it the greatest generation. I mean this is a generation that had a sense of purpose and a sense of patriotism. Was that something that was prevalent here?
MRS. BLACK: Oh yes. I mean if you had someone serving in the Army, you were so proud of it. You hung, there was, there were little flags with the stars on them. The mothers always hung up their service flag. It seems like everybody volunteered to go to the, I mean they were drafted too. But I know my brother volunteered. He tried to get in the Navy. They wouldn’t take him. He had a bad eardrum or something, and he was really disappointed. But oh, many people volunteered. And we were very patriotic. Whenever we gathered, we sang a patriotic song and the movies were patriotic. Everything was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Do you remember any of the movies, do you remember any of the names of the movies that you saw here in Oak Ridge?
MRS. BLACK: I don’t know. Yes, I remember the movies but I can’t think at the moment. But all of the songs were related to the movies too, you know. “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me,” and, “When Johnny comes marching home again.” Maybe that was from another war. But we did sing a lot of, “I’ll walk alone,” something like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, let’s see. What else? Yeah, I guess… So you’re working at K-25 and you’re leak pipe leak tester.
MRS. BLACK: Umhum.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you ever discover what that was for?
MRS. BLACK: Do you know I, it sounds so strange, I didn’t. They told you not to ask and not to tell, and I didn’t. But I had come from a Catholic school, you know, run by the nuns, and we just did what they told us to. It was just normal not to talk about anything we weren’t supposed to. But I’m sure my husband knew, but he didn’t tell me. It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. But I’ve heard, you know, other people say, “Oh well, I just had to know what we were doing and I asked my husband, I made my husband tell me.” But he didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me about the day that the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and the world discovered what Oak Ridge was doing.
MRS. BLACK: Well, it was a shock. I was…
MR. MCDANIEL: Hold on just a minute. (pause) [inaudible] Ok, go ahead…
MRS. BLACK: The day the war was over, it was a surprise to, well, to all of us who were working on leaks, I guess. Or we acted like it was. I guess the Oak Ridge paper didn’t come out with it because we only came out on Thursday. I don’t know what day this happened. But I remember the Knoxville newspapers were a nickel. When we came out of the plant, they were selling for a dollar, and I thought, “Well, what in the world,” you know. We wanted a paper but we didn’t want to pay a dollar for it, but I guess we did. And it was just mad. Everybody was just so excited and just thrilled, real happy. To know that we had done something that would help win the war. I know we were criticized for dropping the bomb. But if you lived in that time, I think you would just think that was the only thing you could do. We wanted to stop the war and stop all the killing. They say the scientists went through the town yelling “uranium”, you know, “plutonium”, “atomic”. But we didn’t because I didn’t know those words anyway, I mean you know, but they did and I guess they’d been bottled up for a long time. So for them that was a release. But for us it was just happy and we thought well we’ll be going home soon. But they did ask us to stay on the job, I remember that. Many people just quit immediately. Some of the girls who were waiting for their fellas to come home, they left because they were going far away. I was from Nashville and it wouldn’t be far to go anyway. But it was a happy time.
MR. MCDANIEL: So people just, the day after, they just, they just up and left? They said, “Its over, I’m going home.”
MRS. BLACK: Some people did. They did. It’s all over, you know, by the time I get home, my husband may be home or my brother may be home. We were, we were excited and looking for our brother to come home too.
MR. MCDANIEL: I had something I was thinking about…
MRS. BLACK: Happy time.
MR. MCDANIEL: I was going to ask you…
MRS. BLACK: Um….
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh what was it? Oh I know what it was… Some people told me that when they worked at K-25, of course, that they had, the girls would go through a training session on how to act and things such as that… Do you remember anything like that?
MRS. BLACK: How to act?
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah…like to not to distract the men…and…
MRS. BLACK: I went through a training session out in, it was the old Wheat School. But they just showed us how to do the pipes. No, we, I guess they knew we’d know how to act. We were ladies. We were young women. Things were different then. I mean we weren’t the way they are now. We didn’t have to be told…
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah…yeah…
MRS. BLACK: So.
MR. MCDANIEL: So I guess…
MRS. BLACK: Maybe they told the fellas. (laughter) But they didn’t, they didn’t tell me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. BLACK: No.
MR. MCDANIEL: So were there a lot of young ladies like you? I mean there weren’t…
MRS. BLACK: Yes. There were a lot of young ladies that had just gotten out of high school. They were here looking for a job and looking for a husband. You know in those days, not as many went to college as they do now. The thing was to get out and get a husband. So I think women had a couple of fields to go into. You could go into teaching or nursing or home ec. Something like that. Maybe be a secretary. But it wasn’t open for everything like it is now. And so we just expected to get married and have a family.
MR. MCDANIEL: I guess this was a good place to find a husband.
MRS. BLACK: Well, it was. (laughter)
MR. MCDANIEL: There’s a lot ladies…
MRS. BLACK: There were a lot of young single ladies and a lot of young single guys. I guess there were a lot of married people too. Like I said, the married people had it more difficult, because you know, with children and no babysitters around and… So I know a friend of mine said it was easy to get a babysitter, because some of single people wanted to come in and take a bath in a tub. They had a house, and they said, oh, they would just do anything to come in and get a bath and sit down at a table without standing in line to the cafeteria. But we really didn’t even mind the lines there much because you were always talking to people. In those days. It just seemed like you’re here and you’re in the gates and you were safe and we didn’t even lock the doors of a house. I’m sure we had keys, but we didn’t lock the doors to the dorm. We just expected everybody to be truthful, and they were because they’d all had clearances, you know.
MR. MCDANIEL: I guess this was probably one of the safest places in the world to live…
MRS. BLACK: I think it was. Not many people died because we were so young. We didn’t have cars, we didn’t even have a funeral home, you know, in the very beginning. I think one came in and didn’t have any business and it went out. So look at the funeral homes we have now. So.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right…
MRS. BLACK: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: I had heard that there wasn’t any funeral homes but I didn’t know one came in and then left.
MRS. BLACK: Yeah it was across from the hospital and I can’t remember the name of it but it left. They said that if you had a cemetery plot here you could bring your loved one back and bury them here in the cemetery, but you had to have passes. Some also said that the guards would take needles or pins and stick them in the corpse, just to see that they were dead and were not spies that would jump up and cause trouble. But I don’t know that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. BLACK: But that was…that’s the story that went around.
MR. MCDANIEL: That’s a good story. Tell me…what are some of the other stories you…
MRS. BLACK: Well I don’t know, they said, you know we didn’t have the funeral homes and we didn’t have any place to sit down. You know, used to be in our home town, if you had an event, well you’d call the funeral home, and they’d send out folding chairs and you’d all sit down. But here in Oak Ridge, we had stand-up teas and stand-up things you know, because we didn’t have enough chairs to go around. So that was a little bit different.
MR. MCDANIEL: I guess so. What about security? I mean, you know, I’m sure you heard stories about spies and stuff…
MRS. BLACK: Oh yeah. We heard stories about spies. They said security was tight. In the beginning, there were guards that patrolled on horseback around the outside area. They were outside the fence or maybe just inside the fence, but anyway security was really tight. We had to wear our badges in plain view. I mean if you went to a movie, if you went to the grocery store, you wore your badge! That was the thing to do.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. BLACK: Uhhuh. And you never knew who was spying and you weren’t supposed to tell anything. You weren’t supposed to tell what you were doing or how many people were doing it. Because they didn’t want you to know that this was even a big city, and it was. It was 75,000 people. So if they asked you, you know, what are you doing out there in Oak Ridge, you know, you wouldn’t dare tell. If they’d say, “Well, what are you making out there in Oak Ridge?” You would tell them, you know, “76 cents an hour.” If they asked you, “Well, how many people do you think are working out there,” you’d say, “Oh, about half of them.” You never gave a good direct answer and if you, if they persisted, then you were supposed to report them for asking too many questions.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. BLACK: That’s right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well my goodness. I had heard the statistic once that about one out of every 10 people that was in Oak Ridge, worked for the military intelligence. They were report…
MRS. BLACK: Is that right?
MR. MCDANIEL: They reported to military intelligence on a regular basis, the things that they, you know … I don’t know if they got paid extra for it or what… If they’d gave reports every week or every two weeks or something like that on things that they saw and heard…
MRS. BLACK: Right. They say the mail was censored. I don’t know, I mean, I guess we didn’t write many letters. But you know we had two mail deliveries a day. Isn’t that unusual? But we had three cent stamps and two mail deliveries a day. A girl from the hospital, she was a nurse, and she told me that she had written home to her mom, and told them well it’s kind of dull up here, not much doing. I’m setting on, or I nurse, whatever she did, she said, I had about so many cases of this and that, and she was called on the carpet. They said you cannot tell how many appendix were taken out in the hospital in a week’s time. They said the Germans could figure out how many people were in Oak Ridge and what they were doing. So I don’t know but…
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. BLACK: Then she, we weren’t supposed to take pictures. I guess you could have a camera if it were registered, but then you could, of course, you couldn’t take pictures of the plant or anything. And she sketched. She was just sitting out there sketching just some scenery, the mud, stuff, and they wouldn’t let her sketch. They said, “Oh no, you can’t do that. This is a secret area.” So she went home. Back to Ohio. She said, “I’d rather be where I can talk.” So it did bother a lot of people to have such secrets. But it didn’t bother me. I didn’t know any better.
MR. MCDANIEL: There was a lady told me once, speaking of that, that there was a young woman that, I guess, down near Kingston or something, she rented a room and that they caught her up on the ridge sketching the valley and she disappeared. She was never heard from again.
MRS. BLACK: Oh no.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Yeah, and the story is that she was a spy. She was a spy.
MRS. BLACK: Oh, she actually was a spy. That was her cover, but she was really a spy.
MR. MCDANIEL: She was really a spy. And another lady I interviewed, speaking of the mail, she worked at the post office…
MRS. BLACK: Oh, did she?
MR. MCDANIEL: And she said they opened packages coming and going regularly…
MRS. BLACK: Umhum.
MR. MCDANIEL: You know. The thing that I was telling about the military intelligence, is that she, she told me that her husband, she found when she first moved here, she found a stack of envelopes addressed to, this’ll be in the documentary, addressed to a banking institution in Knoxville.
MRS. BLACK: Oh…
MR. MCDANIEL: And she said, she was afraid her husband had taken out a big loan or something. And she asked him what it was and he had to tell her that he worked in military intelligence.
MRS. BLACK: Oh.
MR. MCDANIEL: And this was a cover. He sent reports every week to them. She said about a month later, they came to her and asked her to do the same thing.
MRS. BLACK: Oh really…
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MRS. BLACK: Well, that would put you on the spot wouldn’t it, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: It certainly would.
MRS. BLACK: Well no. They didn’t ask me to do that. I was just, you know, just a worker, that’s all. Insignificant. I didn’t, I never met General Groves or any of the top officials that I know of. I just did my daily job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Umhum.
MRS. BLACK: So that was great.
MR. MCDANIEL: So tell me a little bit about after the war, you know, living in Oak Ridge. What was it like to live here then? Do you remember when the, were you here when they opened the gates? Do you remember?
MRS. BLACK: Oh yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me about that.
MRS. BLACK: Well they had a great, big, ceremony. Opening the gates and cars lined up for miles away to get into the area. You know, people were joking, “Oh, they’re going to let those eggheads out of Oak Ridge,” you know, “We outta be scared out here.” But a lot of the people were frightened inside because we had been so protected all along. We didn’t especially want the gates down, I mean we just liked it that way. You know for some, it was really nice because if the mother-in-law came you could keep her waiting at the gate till you got the house cleaned up. You didn’t have to rush. You could leave her down there for a while. But for other people…
MR. MCDANIEL: (laughter) That’s funny.
MRS. BLACK: Well you know, if someone came unexpectedly, you know, to get you, they’d have to stay down there until you brought a pass down and let them in. They had to have a pass.
MR. MCDANIEL: How would you get a pass?
MRS. BLACK: You’d have to go to town hall and get a pass. Ask for it. And they had to wear that pass around their neck, you know, where you wore your badge, they wore the pass. It was kind of a cardboard thing…
MR. MCDANIEL: What would they ask you, I mean when you went down to get a pass? Would they ask who it was and what…
MRS. BLACK: Yeah, and what, and how long they were going to be here and would you be responsible for this person. It was just, it was another security thing. So anyway, we didn’t, a lot of people didn’t want to have to go through that hassle.
MR. MCDANIEL: But the day they opened the…
MRS. BLACK: But the day they opened the gates, they had a ribbon burning. I mean, you know, it was supposed be a big atomic flash. They invited all the movie stars that wanted to come. We had Adolphe Menjou. You probably don’t remember him. He was an old actor then. And Rod Cameron, and Marie ”the Body” McDonald. And some of them were maybe B actors, maybe not the real big stars. But we had the parade down the Turnpike. Then there was a guy named Jack Bailey and he had a radio show, “Queen for the Day.” So he selected a queen here in Oak Ridge and that was a big deal. We had the governor here. They had many little things planned for that day. So it was a fun thing. Bands and I think a lot of bands came from Nashville and came from all over to see the opening of this city. What we didn’t want was all the salesmen coming in: the magazine salesman, anything that came to your house. We didn’t want people come a knocking on our door. But it worked out.
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet. I bet a lot of people were really, they came to Oak Ridge because they were curious.
MRS. BLACK: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: I mean you know, a lot of people from the area came…
MRS. BLACK: From the, right, because they couldn’t have gotten in otherwise. But see, we were just lulled into just this peaceful little community and that is just the way we wanted to stay. There was a dry cleaner here and he would, had his normal route. He would come to this house and he would say, you know, pick-up the cleaning for the week. She’d say, “Just take whatever’s dirty, I’m not going to be here,” you know, “Just take whatever’s dirty.” So he’d go in, take stuff out of the closet that was dirty and then when he came back, she didn’t know how much money to leave. She would just leave some money on the dresser and say to take whatever it costs. That’s how honest we were then. I mean it was just ridiculous, you know.
MR. MCDANIEL: That’s amazing.
MRS. BLACK: We trusted everybody.
MR. MCDANIEL: That’s amazing… [inaudible] Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?
MRS. BLACK: Well I guess not. I can’t… I should’ve boned up on it…but…
MR. MCDANIEL: That’s ok…that’s quite alright…
MRS. BLACK: No.
[End of Interview]

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SECRET CITY FILM COLLECTION
ORAL HISTORY OF COLLEEN BLACK
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
October 20, 2004
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me that they’ve heard you speak to friends of hers. Her husband’s Dr. Ricche. Della Ricche is her name…
MRS. BLACK: Oh…
MR. MCDANIEL: Tall, blonde headed, you must have just spoken to their medical…
MRS. BLACK: Medical.
MR. MCDANIEL: Medical wives or...
MRS. BLACK: Yeah…medical wives…yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: And she’s telling me, “You need to interview her.” I said, “Oh, she’s on my advisory board and I’m absolutely going to interview her.” So I interviewed her once but I have to do it again. But I want to interview the mayor again too…
MRS. BLACK: Oh good…ok.
MR. MCDANIEL: Because I told him… I said, “David,” I said, “you lost so much weight.” He’s lost about 20 pounds…
MRS. BLACK: Oh well. I wish I could say the same.
MR. MCDANIEL: His double chins gone. So I said I want to interview you again, because there are more things I want to talk to you about anyway, but anyway, so tell me, let’s just do this again. Tell me about how you first came to Oak Ridge…
MRS. BLACK: Well, I first came to Oak Ridge with my parents in 1944. I didn’t want to come and I didn’t want to stay, but my parents assured me it was just a temporary thing we were going through. That we’d be, you know, going back home right after the war. And, of course, that was over sixty years ago and I’m still here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now how old were you when you came to Oak Ridge?
MRS. BLACK: 18.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok…so what did you do when you got here? Did you work or did you go to school?
MRS. BLACK: No, I was, I had graduated from high school and so I applied for a job and I got it…K-25. Then they put me through some training to teach me how to test for leaks in pipes and I didn’t know why we had to have the pipes or why they needed to be leak proof or where they were going, but I tested them. Then, if there were any leaks in the pipes, we sent them back and they repaired them. And that was my job, but I couldn’t tell anybody then what I was doing. I was a leak test operator.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? How long did you do that?
MRS. BLACK: About two years, ’44 to ’46.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well what was it like? Tell me a little bit about your family, you know, and I know you had a, didn’t you have a brother that was in the service?
MRS. BLACK: I did. I had a brother that was in the service. That was the reason we came, because my mother wanted to go into war work and get the war over with and bring…everybody home and get back to normal. But there were 10 children in the family, so it was very difficult to find a place to live in Oak Ridge with that many children. Besides that, you had to have, you had to have the proper job and you had to have just the right credentials to get a job. Being on construction, which my father was, he didn’t have the credentials to get a cemesto house. They wouldn’t give a home to a working mother because she wasn’t the head of the family. So, but eventually we got a trailer. It was a double-wide and my brother went to work, and he got a hut. He lived in a hutment. I applied for a dorm and got the dormitory room. So we weren’t home all at the same time. But when we were, you know, we ate in shifts, we slept in shifts, we worked in shifts, but it was the thing to do then. You know we’d do anything for the war effort.
MR. MCDANIEL: What was being a young woman like here in, you know, what was, when’d you come? ’44?
MRS. BLACK: In ’44. It was a wonderful place for the singles. I think the housewives had it a lot worse than we because they had to stand in line, maybe holding babies, and juggling ration points and all the things they had to go through. But the single person, we could go to the cafeteria and we could eat and there were dances and a lot of recreation for us. We had about five bowling alleys and a lot of movie theaters and there were a lot of sports. You know, every shift in the plant, I think, had a bowling league and a ball league. They were very active then.
MR. MCDANIEL: What was the social life like?
MRS. BLACK: It was great. Like I say, the dances and when I worked, I worked for a GI and it was nice to be able to date a GI because they had access to the PX. Instead of bringing you flowers and a box of candy, he would bring you a box of soap and maybe a candy bar. That was great because soap was just really scarce and with all that mud we needed a lot of soap.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me about the mud a little bit…
MRS. BLACK: Oh it was horrible.
MR. MCDANIEL: And what was it like to stay clean?
MRS. BLACK: Well it was very difficult to stay clean. I know the first day I got here I lost a shoe. You’d put your foot down and the shoe just disappeared in the mud. And shoes were rationed. So I went over and applied to get some safety shoes. You could order the safety shoes through the plant, and they had the big steel toes, and if you qualified you could get the safety shoes. Since I worked on pipes and they might drop on your feet, I qualified. They weren’t very pretty. They weren’t glamorous. But the mud was bad and you would always have a bathtub full of muddy boots, I mean if you could get the boots. It was hard. We had one fella and he said that he worked in the mud all day and he came home, went in the dormitory and took a shower with his clothes on. He said he just liked to do his laundry and his personal bathing at the same time. So that was one way to do it.
MR. MCDANIEL: What was it like living in the dorm?
MRS. BLACK: It was great. There was, it was young, everybody was young. That’s hard to believe now that everybody’s so old. But the median age was something like 35. You know you couldn’t live here unless you worked here. I mean very few, maybe there was a couple of grandmothers but not very many. They were all very young people just here to have a good time and get the war over. There’s a real spirit about working together and working hard and playing hard. So it was fun.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, you got around, I guess, on buses.
MRS. BLACK: Buses. You know they didn’t make cars after 1942 because they were making planes and jeeps and tanks and all those things. So if you had a car, you were lucky. But see, since gas was rationed, you couldn’t have, you couldn’t go take a Sunday afternoon drive, you’d feel guilty. If anyone did have a car, you usually had to fill it up. You just wouldn’t, one person just go out and take a drive. So we did have buses. We had a lot of buses in Oak Ridge. We had on-area buses, that were nice and modern. And we had off-area buses. We had work buses that were like, they called them cattle cars. They were kind of like cattle cars they had benches on both sides and a stove in the middle. And you would just slide from one end to the other. But you’d get to work. And they had free buses right at the very beginning, you didn’t have to pay to ride the bus.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, let’s see, what else do I want to talk about. Tell me the story about I guess this is a little bit later. Tell me about how you met your husband.
MRS. BLACK: Met my husband at work. I was, they called it “on the floor.” There was a great big floor in the conditioning building where they did nothing but test pipes. So he came in and he needed a few girls to go with him, somewhere secret. I was one of them chosen and that’s how I met him. I met him on Halloween night, it was. So we dated and you know there were plenty of dances and like I say, bowling alleys and there were buses to Big Ridge. You could go up there and have a nice, you know, swim or canoe, whatever. It was fun.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now talk a little bit about the cafeterias. Tell me about the cafeterias. What the food was like.
MRS. BLACK: Well I thought it was good if you didn’t have to cook it and if you didn’t have to stand in line to buy it. The cafeterias were, I thought, were wonderful. Now I’ve heard a lot of people say they were terrible. But I guess I didn’t know any better. We’d go to the cafeteria and right away you could get what you wanted to for under a dollar. Afterwards we’d, sometimes we’d just stay and have a sing-along. That’s where we met other people and it was just kind of a gathering place. I liked the cafeterias.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now what’s the story…you said you had some of the silverware…
MRS. BLACK: Oh! (laugh) Well you weren’t supposed to steal the silverware. But you couldn’t buy any forks and knives, anything because everything had gone to war. But the cafeteria had knives and forks and spoons. So when we got married, we didn’t have anything to eat with at home, so we each took a set from the cafeteria. They had U.S. printed on them and we said that meant “us”. We really had planned to take them back, you know after the war. But somehow the cafeterias closed and they left, and I’m left with one tablespoon. That’s all I have of our collection.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you still have the tablespoon.
MRS. BLACK: I still have the tablespoon with U.S. on it, my souvenir.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you got married? When did you get married?
MRS. BLACK: Got married in ’45. 1945. I got married at the Chapel-on-the-Hill. It was like taking a number in the meat market, so many people getting married because we were very young. In those days we got married and then we moved into a house. I mean you couldn’t get a house unless you were married. The military couldn’t get a house. Well, the higher ups could, but I mean just the plain old GI who worked out the plant, we weren’t really qualified for anything more than, we called it a victory cottage. We didn’t get that right away. We had to get on a list. We were pleased with that. I mean it was just a small little unit, sort of like a duplex. It had an icebox. It didn’t even have a refrigerator. And the stove was hard to do. It was oil. I didn’t know how to use that. But anyway we managed. Glad to get it.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you eventually got a D house…
MRS. BLACK: Well, as we qualified, we moved up. See in order to get an A house, see, you had to have a child. A B house…a C house you had to have two children, had to have three children I guess for the C house. And for the D house and they had to be the opposite sex over a certain age, so it was really complicated. So we moved from, well we moved from the trailer to the victory cottage, to an A, to an E, and then finally to the D. And I’m still in the D.
MR. MCDANIEL: When did you move to the D…when your…
MRS. BLACK: Me? It was in 1950.
MR. MCDANIEL: 1950?
MRS. BLACK: After we qualified. After we had three children. (laugh) So…we have eight children, we had eight children, we still have, so…
MR. MCDANIEL: Well my goodness.
MRS. BLACK: So anyway, the house just kind of, it grew with us. Then we could add to it and, dig down under, put a little attic in, and put in a basement, and decks, so.
MR. MCDANIEL: So what did you…what did your husband do during the war for work…
MRS. BLACK: Well. It was a secret. I don’t know. He was in the Army. And the Army did things that, I don’t know what they did. But they were on call and they could work two shifts or so, you know. At first, they lived in the barracks, the Army barracks. Then that was confusing and they couldn’t get any sleep with the maids coming in making up the beds in the morning. So they moved the GIs that were on the same shift in the same plant area, they each got a separate hut. So he moved in the hutment. And that worked better, that they all worked for the same shift. Then, I don’t know what he did. I mean they didn’t have a telephone in the hut. If he had to stay at work, he just stayed at work. Maybe they’d just send for him. So I don’t know. He worked in the conditioning building, 1401.
MR. MCDANIEL: In K-25?
MRS. BLACK: K-25.
MR. MCDANIEL: So he got out of the service and stayed in Oak Ridge? Or…
MRS. BLACK: He got out of the service and went with the newly formed AEC [Atomic Energy Commission]. And so we just stayed here through DOE [Department of Energy] and whatever else that came along. It was just, I don’t know, just easy. We liked it here, we made friends here, they had good schools, good recreation around the lakes and we liked the area.
MR. MCDANIEL: Talk a little bit about in the war years. I mean the sense of, I guess the sense of, you know, they call it the greatest generation. I mean this is a generation that had a sense of purpose and a sense of patriotism. Was that something that was prevalent here?
MRS. BLACK: Oh yes. I mean if you had someone serving in the Army, you were so proud of it. You hung, there was, there were little flags with the stars on them. The mothers always hung up their service flag. It seems like everybody volunteered to go to the, I mean they were drafted too. But I know my brother volunteered. He tried to get in the Navy. They wouldn’t take him. He had a bad eardrum or something, and he was really disappointed. But oh, many people volunteered. And we were very patriotic. Whenever we gathered, we sang a patriotic song and the movies were patriotic. Everything was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Do you remember any of the movies, do you remember any of the names of the movies that you saw here in Oak Ridge?
MRS. BLACK: I don’t know. Yes, I remember the movies but I can’t think at the moment. But all of the songs were related to the movies too, you know. “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me,” and, “When Johnny comes marching home again.” Maybe that was from another war. But we did sing a lot of, “I’ll walk alone,” something like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, let’s see. What else? Yeah, I guess… So you’re working at K-25 and you’re leak pipe leak tester.
MRS. BLACK: Umhum.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you ever discover what that was for?
MRS. BLACK: Do you know I, it sounds so strange, I didn’t. They told you not to ask and not to tell, and I didn’t. But I had come from a Catholic school, you know, run by the nuns, and we just did what they told us to. It was just normal not to talk about anything we weren’t supposed to. But I’m sure my husband knew, but he didn’t tell me. It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. But I’ve heard, you know, other people say, “Oh well, I just had to know what we were doing and I asked my husband, I made my husband tell me.” But he didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me about the day that the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and the world discovered what Oak Ridge was doing.
MRS. BLACK: Well, it was a shock. I was…
MR. MCDANIEL: Hold on just a minute. (pause) [inaudible] Ok, go ahead…
MRS. BLACK: The day the war was over, it was a surprise to, well, to all of us who were working on leaks, I guess. Or we acted like it was. I guess the Oak Ridge paper didn’t come out with it because we only came out on Thursday. I don’t know what day this happened. But I remember the Knoxville newspapers were a nickel. When we came out of the plant, they were selling for a dollar, and I thought, “Well, what in the world,” you know. We wanted a paper but we didn’t want to pay a dollar for it, but I guess we did. And it was just mad. Everybody was just so excited and just thrilled, real happy. To know that we had done something that would help win the war. I know we were criticized for dropping the bomb. But if you lived in that time, I think you would just think that was the only thing you could do. We wanted to stop the war and stop all the killing. They say the scientists went through the town yelling “uranium”, you know, “plutonium”, “atomic”. But we didn’t because I didn’t know those words anyway, I mean you know, but they did and I guess they’d been bottled up for a long time. So for them that was a release. But for us it was just happy and we thought well we’ll be going home soon. But they did ask us to stay on the job, I remember that. Many people just quit immediately. Some of the girls who were waiting for their fellas to come home, they left because they were going far away. I was from Nashville and it wouldn’t be far to go anyway. But it was a happy time.
MR. MCDANIEL: So people just, the day after, they just, they just up and left? They said, “Its over, I’m going home.”
MRS. BLACK: Some people did. They did. It’s all over, you know, by the time I get home, my husband may be home or my brother may be home. We were, we were excited and looking for our brother to come home too.
MR. MCDANIEL: I had something I was thinking about…
MRS. BLACK: Happy time.
MR. MCDANIEL: I was going to ask you…
MRS. BLACK: Um….
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh what was it? Oh I know what it was… Some people told me that when they worked at K-25, of course, that they had, the girls would go through a training session on how to act and things such as that… Do you remember anything like that?
MRS. BLACK: How to act?
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah…like to not to distract the men…and…
MRS. BLACK: I went through a training session out in, it was the old Wheat School. But they just showed us how to do the pipes. No, we, I guess they knew we’d know how to act. We were ladies. We were young women. Things were different then. I mean we weren’t the way they are now. We didn’t have to be told…
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah…yeah…
MRS. BLACK: So.
MR. MCDANIEL: So I guess…
MRS. BLACK: Maybe they told the fellas. (laughter) But they didn’t, they didn’t tell me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. BLACK: No.
MR. MCDANIEL: So were there a lot of young ladies like you? I mean there weren’t…
MRS. BLACK: Yes. There were a lot of young ladies that had just gotten out of high school. They were here looking for a job and looking for a husband. You know in those days, not as many went to college as they do now. The thing was to get out and get a husband. So I think women had a couple of fields to go into. You could go into teaching or nursing or home ec. Something like that. Maybe be a secretary. But it wasn’t open for everything like it is now. And so we just expected to get married and have a family.
MR. MCDANIEL: I guess this was a good place to find a husband.
MRS. BLACK: Well, it was. (laughter)
MR. MCDANIEL: There’s a lot ladies…
MRS. BLACK: There were a lot of young single ladies and a lot of young single guys. I guess there were a lot of married people too. Like I said, the married people had it more difficult, because you know, with children and no babysitters around and… So I know a friend of mine said it was easy to get a babysitter, because some of single people wanted to come in and take a bath in a tub. They had a house, and they said, oh, they would just do anything to come in and get a bath and sit down at a table without standing in line to the cafeteria. But we really didn’t even mind the lines there much because you were always talking to people. In those days. It just seemed like you’re here and you’re in the gates and you were safe and we didn’t even lock the doors of a house. I’m sure we had keys, but we didn’t lock the doors to the dorm. We just expected everybody to be truthful, and they were because they’d all had clearances, you know.
MR. MCDANIEL: I guess this was probably one of the safest places in the world to live…
MRS. BLACK: I think it was. Not many people died because we were so young. We didn’t have cars, we didn’t even have a funeral home, you know, in the very beginning. I think one came in and didn’t have any business and it went out. So look at the funeral homes we have now. So.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right…
MRS. BLACK: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: I had heard that there wasn’t any funeral homes but I didn’t know one came in and then left.
MRS. BLACK: Yeah it was across from the hospital and I can’t remember the name of it but it left. They said that if you had a cemetery plot here you could bring your loved one back and bury them here in the cemetery, but you had to have passes. Some also said that the guards would take needles or pins and stick them in the corpse, just to see that they were dead and were not spies that would jump up and cause trouble. But I don’t know that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. BLACK: But that was…that’s the story that went around.
MR. MCDANIEL: That’s a good story. Tell me…what are some of the other stories you…
MRS. BLACK: Well I don’t know, they said, you know we didn’t have the funeral homes and we didn’t have any place to sit down. You know, used to be in our home town, if you had an event, well you’d call the funeral home, and they’d send out folding chairs and you’d all sit down. But here in Oak Ridge, we had stand-up teas and stand-up things you know, because we didn’t have enough chairs to go around. So that was a little bit different.
MR. MCDANIEL: I guess so. What about security? I mean, you know, I’m sure you heard stories about spies and stuff…
MRS. BLACK: Oh yeah. We heard stories about spies. They said security was tight. In the beginning, there were guards that patrolled on horseback around the outside area. They were outside the fence or maybe just inside the fence, but anyway security was really tight. We had to wear our badges in plain view. I mean if you went to a movie, if you went to the grocery store, you wore your badge! That was the thing to do.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. BLACK: Uhhuh. And you never knew who was spying and you weren’t supposed to tell anything. You weren’t supposed to tell what you were doing or how many people were doing it. Because they didn’t want you to know that this was even a big city, and it was. It was 75,000 people. So if they asked you, you know, what are you doing out there in Oak Ridge, you know, you wouldn’t dare tell. If they’d say, “Well, what are you making out there in Oak Ridge?” You would tell them, you know, “76 cents an hour.” If they asked you, “Well, how many people do you think are working out there,” you’d say, “Oh, about half of them.” You never gave a good direct answer and if you, if they persisted, then you were supposed to report them for asking too many questions.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. BLACK: That’s right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well my goodness. I had heard the statistic once that about one out of every 10 people that was in Oak Ridge, worked for the military intelligence. They were report…
MRS. BLACK: Is that right?
MR. MCDANIEL: They reported to military intelligence on a regular basis, the things that they, you know … I don’t know if they got paid extra for it or what… If they’d gave reports every week or every two weeks or something like that on things that they saw and heard…
MRS. BLACK: Right. They say the mail was censored. I don’t know, I mean, I guess we didn’t write many letters. But you know we had two mail deliveries a day. Isn’t that unusual? But we had three cent stamps and two mail deliveries a day. A girl from the hospital, she was a nurse, and she told me that she had written home to her mom, and told them well it’s kind of dull up here, not much doing. I’m setting on, or I nurse, whatever she did, she said, I had about so many cases of this and that, and she was called on the carpet. They said you cannot tell how many appendix were taken out in the hospital in a week’s time. They said the Germans could figure out how many people were in Oak Ridge and what they were doing. So I don’t know but…
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. BLACK: Then she, we weren’t supposed to take pictures. I guess you could have a camera if it were registered, but then you could, of course, you couldn’t take pictures of the plant or anything. And she sketched. She was just sitting out there sketching just some scenery, the mud, stuff, and they wouldn’t let her sketch. They said, “Oh no, you can’t do that. This is a secret area.” So she went home. Back to Ohio. She said, “I’d rather be where I can talk.” So it did bother a lot of people to have such secrets. But it didn’t bother me. I didn’t know any better.
MR. MCDANIEL: There was a lady told me once, speaking of that, that there was a young woman that, I guess, down near Kingston or something, she rented a room and that they caught her up on the ridge sketching the valley and she disappeared. She was never heard from again.
MRS. BLACK: Oh no.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Yeah, and the story is that she was a spy. She was a spy.
MRS. BLACK: Oh, she actually was a spy. That was her cover, but she was really a spy.
MR. MCDANIEL: She was really a spy. And another lady I interviewed, speaking of the mail, she worked at the post office…
MRS. BLACK: Oh, did she?
MR. MCDANIEL: And she said they opened packages coming and going regularly…
MRS. BLACK: Umhum.
MR. MCDANIEL: You know. The thing that I was telling about the military intelligence, is that she, she told me that her husband, she found when she first moved here, she found a stack of envelopes addressed to, this’ll be in the documentary, addressed to a banking institution in Knoxville.
MRS. BLACK: Oh…
MR. MCDANIEL: And she said, she was afraid her husband had taken out a big loan or something. And she asked him what it was and he had to tell her that he worked in military intelligence.
MRS. BLACK: Oh.
MR. MCDANIEL: And this was a cover. He sent reports every week to them. She said about a month later, they came to her and asked her to do the same thing.
MRS. BLACK: Oh really…
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MRS. BLACK: Well, that would put you on the spot wouldn’t it, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: It certainly would.
MRS. BLACK: Well no. They didn’t ask me to do that. I was just, you know, just a worker, that’s all. Insignificant. I didn’t, I never met General Groves or any of the top officials that I know of. I just did my daily job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Umhum.
MRS. BLACK: So that was great.
MR. MCDANIEL: So tell me a little bit about after the war, you know, living in Oak Ridge. What was it like to live here then? Do you remember when the, were you here when they opened the gates? Do you remember?
MRS. BLACK: Oh yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me about that.
MRS. BLACK: Well they had a great, big, ceremony. Opening the gates and cars lined up for miles away to get into the area. You know, people were joking, “Oh, they’re going to let those eggheads out of Oak Ridge,” you know, “We outta be scared out here.” But a lot of the people were frightened inside because we had been so protected all along. We didn’t especially want the gates down, I mean we just liked it that way. You know for some, it was really nice because if the mother-in-law came you could keep her waiting at the gate till you got the house cleaned up. You didn’t have to rush. You could leave her down there for a while. But for other people…
MR. MCDANIEL: (laughter) That’s funny.
MRS. BLACK: Well you know, if someone came unexpectedly, you know, to get you, they’d have to stay down there until you brought a pass down and let them in. They had to have a pass.
MR. MCDANIEL: How would you get a pass?
MRS. BLACK: You’d have to go to town hall and get a pass. Ask for it. And they had to wear that pass around their neck, you know, where you wore your badge, they wore the pass. It was kind of a cardboard thing…
MR. MCDANIEL: What would they ask you, I mean when you went down to get a pass? Would they ask who it was and what…
MRS. BLACK: Yeah, and what, and how long they were going to be here and would you be responsible for this person. It was just, it was another security thing. So anyway, we didn’t, a lot of people didn’t want to have to go through that hassle.
MR. MCDANIEL: But the day they opened the…
MRS. BLACK: But the day they opened the gates, they had a ribbon burning. I mean, you know, it was supposed be a big atomic flash. They invited all the movie stars that wanted to come. We had Adolphe Menjou. You probably don’t remember him. He was an old actor then. And Rod Cameron, and Marie ”the Body” McDonald. And some of them were maybe B actors, maybe not the real big stars. But we had the parade down the Turnpike. Then there was a guy named Jack Bailey and he had a radio show, “Queen for the Day.” So he selected a queen here in Oak Ridge and that was a big deal. We had the governor here. They had many little things planned for that day. So it was a fun thing. Bands and I think a lot of bands came from Nashville and came from all over to see the opening of this city. What we didn’t want was all the salesmen coming in: the magazine salesman, anything that came to your house. We didn’t want people come a knocking on our door. But it worked out.
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet. I bet a lot of people were really, they came to Oak Ridge because they were curious.
MRS. BLACK: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: I mean you know, a lot of people from the area came…
MRS. BLACK: From the, right, because they couldn’t have gotten in otherwise. But see, we were just lulled into just this peaceful little community and that is just the way we wanted to stay. There was a dry cleaner here and he would, had his normal route. He would come to this house and he would say, you know, pick-up the cleaning for the week. She’d say, “Just take whatever’s dirty, I’m not going to be here,” you know, “Just take whatever’s dirty.” So he’d go in, take stuff out of the closet that was dirty and then when he came back, she didn’t know how much money to leave. She would just leave some money on the dresser and say to take whatever it costs. That’s how honest we were then. I mean it was just ridiculous, you know.
MR. MCDANIEL: That’s amazing.
MRS. BLACK: We trusted everybody.
MR. MCDANIEL: That’s amazing… [inaudible] Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?
MRS. BLACK: Well I guess not. I can’t… I should’ve boned up on it…but…
MR. MCDANIEL: That’s ok…that’s quite alright…
MRS. BLACK: No.
[End of Interview]